Subject: Re: How I lost my faith (very long)
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 20:07:47 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3223397271096662@naggum.net>
* Thaddeus L Olczyk
| Yes and given that Gregor Kiczales was the principle "architect" ( not
| meant in the software development sense ) and invented those things
| in Lisp, it indicates that he does not think Lisp to grow much.
This does not follow. All we can conclude from his choice of vehicle for
his ideas is that he found it the locally optimal choice at the time.
There is no reason to maximize any crises, here.
Common Lisp is _not_ "popular". This fact is never going to change.
What we want to do with Common Lisp is not going to be stuff that can be
done with a random selection of people off the streat.
However, it _is_ getting increasingly harder to start using Common Lisp
in a project -- because the path of least resistance goes through a more
specialized tool for the kinds of tasks people are now generally starting
new projects. Optimizing for popularity is one way to avoid Common Lisp.
Optimizing for extensibility, building systems that can themselves be
used to build applications, _without_ the annoying Open Source thing, is
Common Lisp's forté. The ability to think "system" is not very common
with today's crop of programmers who are mostly building inside somebody
else's systems (be they Windows or something like KDE or GNOME, or the
whole Java system), and Common Lisp programmers have someone gotten into
the mindset that they must fit into other systems, and this is where it
is least likely to win in the short term.
///
--
In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.